


timeless

by thisisthefamilybusiness



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Age Difference, Aging, Angst, But today is not that day, Domestic, F/F, Grief/Mourning, Growing Old Together, Heavy Angst, Immortality, Long-Term Relationship(s), Married Life, Minor Original Character(s), Moments of Fluff But Mostly Angst, Post-Canon, References to Physician-Assisted Suicide, implied suicidal thoughts, maybe one day I will write something that DOESN'T use the angst tag, on a technicality - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-08
Updated: 2017-05-08
Packaged: 2018-10-29 09:00:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,945
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10850730
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thisisthefamilybusiness/pseuds/thisisthefamilybusiness
Summary: Fareeha cups Angela’s face in her palm, smiling gently. “You thought I would be angry over a mistake?”“I would be angry at myself if I were you,” Angela sobs.“So growing old together may not happen. But you’re telling me I should be angry that my wife is always going to be a beautiful young woman?” Fareeha laughs, kissing the tip of Angela’s nose. “Why would I be angry about that? Isn’t that something other people would die for?”(Fill for the following prompt on Overwatch_Kink: "So there's a theory that Mercy has kept herself artificially young... Fareeha's five years younger than Angela when they fall in love. But the years pass and as Fareeha keeps aging, Angela doesn't. The extent of her self-experimentation was more than anyone realized, and 'growing old together' isn't quite what Fareeha had imagined at all.")





	timeless

**Author's Note:**

> I tried to un-fuck Blizzard's timeline. I feel awful for whatever person's job that is, because this timeline is a mess (Fareeha is 6 at the start of the Omnic Crisis but 32 by the time of the recall? Mercy is shown with the original team in the promo material and looks to be the same age as Jack/Gabriel but the recall says she’s 37?) . 
> 
> Warning for a scene in the middle where there's some mild gore/whump Fareeha. If you wanna skip it, just skip the section titled 60/55 part 1. 
> 
> For spoilers on the Major Character Death warning, click down to the end notes.

 

_37/32_

"You look lovely as ever, Dr. Ziegler," Mei says, smiling. "How old are you again?"

Angela giggles, sipping at her champagne. "A woman has to have her secrets, Dr. Zhou."

"Stealing my fiancée from me at my engagement party, Mei?" Fareeha settles a hand on Angela's shoulder, stealing Angela's glass and taking a sip.

"Wouldn't dream of it, Lieutenant. Congratulations again." Mei sashays away, humming. 

Fareeha drops a kiss on Angela's head. "How is my beautiful bride doing?"

"Better now that you are here." Angela leans back into the leather chair. Fareeha brushes a hand through Angela's soft blond hair.

"You do look lovely," Fareeha says reverently. Though it had taken significant arguing with Angela about what made for appropriate attire at an engagement party (and that a clean labcoat over fresh scrubs was not it), Angela did clean up well, dressed in her only nice clothing—her dress uniform, a sharp navy wool jacket with a dozen-something ribbons and medals pinned to it, a matching knee-length wool skirt and black pumps. Angela had complained earlier that night as she pulled her ribbons and medals from an old tackle box that she’d never liked dress uniforms, but she’d still worn it (mostly after Fareeha kissed her neck and told her a woman in uniform was always sexiest to her).

“So do you, _schäri_.” Angela presses a soft kiss to the back of Fareeha’s hand. “You always look so lovely in blue.”

Fareeha laughs. “The dress is the same color as the Raptora suit.”

“Mm. I am a woman of simple tastes, I suppose.” Angela steals her glass back. “You drank all my champagne,” she sighs, staring at the empty flute.

“Not going to turn into a bridezilla, are you?” Fareeha waved down one of the servers wandering around the Watchpoint’s rec room.

Angela winks, blue eyes shining. “Only if you get me more champagne.”

* * *

 

_45/40_

“ _Schätzli_ , we will be late to our own party,” Angela tsks, sliding in a pearl earring.

Fareeha sighs, picking up her makeup brush again. “Do I look old to you?”

Angela shimmies up behind her, wrapping her arms around her wife, chin nestled in Fareeha’s shoulder. “Nonsense. You look as lovely as the day I met you.” She kisses Fareeha’s cheek, sighing contentedly.

“I was twenty then.” Fareeha daubs a blob of concealer over what she fears is an age spot, eyeing her wife.

Angela is practically as perfect as she was the day they met, skin smooth, hair soft and blond. Her smile is glowing. “And I was twenty-five.” Sure, Angela always has taken incredible care of her skin—a routine that had no less than nine steps, some of them involving ingredients like snail extract or things she had to import from other countries—but no amount of face masks and moisturizers could really account for how close Angela was getting to fifty with a perfect face and body.

Fareeha shakes her head clear. If there was an actual nefarious reason for how Angela managed to look so young, Angela would tell her on her own time. She smiles and shimmies out of Angela’s arms, laughing when Angela mumbles a protest. “Weren’t you just saying we would be late?”

“Isn’t there some rule where the guest of honor is never late to the party?” Angela smooths out the front of her white gown with a frown.

“And waste seeing you blush when you see the banner I saw Oxton running back from the printer’s? I think not.”

“Super,” Angela groans, throwing a hand over her face.

* * *

 

_47/42  
_

_pt. 1_

_Strike-Commander Ana Amari passed away on the twenty-ninth of this month. The head of the Overwatch agency and a former commanding officer in the Egyptian Armed Forces, Commander Amari served during both Omnic Crises. She is survived by her daughter, Fareeha Amari._

Angela gently pries the obituary out of Fareeha’s hand, her own eyes wet with tears, kneeling on the floor of her own office. “I have to tell you something.”

Fareeha wants to scream, wants to cry—but she is silent and still, even as Angela pulls her hands into her own lap, face turned up to Fareeha’s.

“I want you to know—I never intended for any of this,” Angela babbles. “I offered to do the same for your mother, but she refused—and rightfully, but what happened to Gabriel was a mistake, I never calculated what would happen if it was used on someone whose DNA had already been altered—and I know that what happened to me was just because I was the first user, I hadn’t refined the process yet, but I couldn’t get another test subject—”

That snaps Fareeha out of her stupor. “What did you do, Angela?” she says, a little more forcefully than she means to.

Angela smiles, but it’s jagged around the edges somehow. Fareeha has never seen her wife this frazzled before, this far out of it—even in the middle of a combat situation, Angela was always perfectly calm, a voice of reason and, well, mercy. “I tried a dozen times to reverse it, but I can’t fix it, Fareeha.”

“What did you do? Did you do something to my mother?” Fareeha is dimly aware that she’s screaming now, shaking Angela by the shoulders.

“The nanites. Do you remember when I explained what happened to Reaper—how the nanites replaced his flesh, rebuilt him, but his DNA was wrong, it had been corrupted?” Angela smears her mascara as she wipes her eyes with the back of her hand, leaving ugly smudge marks down her face.

“Yes.”

“It was a process I invented—but it was still theoretical—and I couldn’t get a test subject, nobody in Overwatch wanted to be the lab rat, so I did to myself—and look at me now,” Angela cries. “I can’t fix it. I’m stuck like this, Fareeha. I’m never going to get any older.”

“Did you do something to my mother?” Fareeha repeats dumbly, unable to process exactly what Angela is trying to say.

“No. No, that’s just it—Fareeha, I could have saved her. I know I ruined Gabriel, I ruined myself—but the process is stable now, she could have lived another sixty, seventy years. Preserved until she wanted not to be. I learned how to stop the nanites.”

“You could have saved my mother?” This is, at least, something that Fareeha can understand through the fog of grief. “And you didn’t?”

Angela shakes her head. “She did not want to be saved, _schätzeli_. Know that she died peacefully. It was what she wanted, love, it was her time to go, she told me. She was tired. She wanted rest.”

“And you let her?” A scream wells up in Fareeha again.

“Because she deserved it, Fareeha. She was seventy. She wanted rest.” The white sleeve of Angela’s lab coat is grimy now as she uses it again to wipe at her face.

* * *

 

_47/42_

_pt. 2_

Angela is curled up on their sofa, still in her scrubs, when Fareeha gets home, flipping through a folder of notes from her lab assistants. She looks so small, so much younger than Fareeha knows she is.

“You were trying to tell me something, a while ago,” Fareeha whispers, sitting down on the sofa next to her. She can’t bring herself to acknowledge that it had been the day after her mother died—that wound is still too new, too fresh.

Angela bites her lip as she closes her folder. “You must promise me, _schäri_ , you will try to understand?”

“Of course.” Fareeha nods.

“I was younger—twenty-seven. I was stupider. I was a researcher back then, yes. I was the head of experimental medicine. I was onto something, I was so sure—nanites that could rebuild flesh from memory, making healing nearly instantaneous.

“But I couldn’t get a test subject—my past few projects, they were based on old technology, things people understood. The nanites, they were too new. So I tested them on myself.

“I thought things were normal, you see? The healing worked. I took damage in combat and my flesh healed itself. But I was wrong.” Tears threaten to spill down her cheeks. “I did not notice it until much later.

“After the explosion, I found Gabriel, and I tried to repeat the process, but I did not account for his modifications from the Army, and what I did to him…” Angela breaks off to stare at the wall behind Fareeha’s head, expression steely. “I ruined him. I made him into a monster, Fareeha. The nanites couldn’t rebuild his DNA, it was too broken, but they couldn’t leave him, and I still hadn’t figured out how to turn them off—and now, look at him, Fareeha, he barely can keep a physical body for more than an hour before it’s too much work for the nanites to keep rebuilding his decaying cells.

“It was… after Gabriel that I realized what I had done to myself. What I had made myself. Fareeha, I can never get older. The nanites just rebuild me back at twenty-seven. I have tried everything, but there’s nothing I can do.” The tears finally spill over, leaving tracks in Angela’s makeup that Fareeha smooths her thumb over.

Fareeha cups Angela’s face in her palm, smiling gently. “You thought I would be angry over a mistake?”

“I would be angry at myself if I were you,” Angela sobs.

“So growing old together may not happen. But you’re telling me I should be angry that my wife is always going to be a beautiful young woman?” Fareeha laughs, kissing the tip of Angela’s nose. “Why would I be angry about that? Isn’t that something other people would die for?”

“I can’t die, Fareeha.” Angela turns her face into Fareeha’s hand. “I don’t think I can die. I’ve done CT scans, MRIs—they all show me as twenty-seven. I just…keep regenerating.”

That hits somewhere deep inside of Fareeha, and her smile breaks. “What do you mean?”

“The nanites—I can’t stop them, I’ve tried—they just keep rebuilding me. No matter what. There have been missions—back when Overwatch disbanded, when I was a field medic with the UN—I should have died, Fareeha. I took direct fire. Easy target, in the Valkyrie suit—I survived things nobody should. Shrapnel, bullets—I can’t count the number of times I should have died there. But my body just rebuilt itself.” Angela’s entire body shakes as she cries.

Fareeha imagines the future stretched before them, where she’ll grow old and gray while her wife stays as perfect as she looked in their wedding photos. Where Angela, sweet Angela who was always so gentle and caring, would have to bury her next to her mother.

“We’ll be okay, _elbi_. I promise.” Fareeha pulls Angela into her lap, petting her hair. “We will be okay.”

* * *

 

_55/50_

“Do I look alright?” Fareeha stares at her reflection in their bedroom mirror, tugging at the hem of her dress blues’ jacket.

Angela grins, leaning in the doorway, watching her wife. “You look dashing. Blue looks good with your hair like that.”

Fareeha flipped her silver hair over her shoulder. “I look like my mother.” It had taken a year for Angela to convince her to stop dyeing her hair to cover the gray, but—begrudgingly—Fareeha had to admit she looked just as lovely with gray hair as with black.

“Mm, was your mother a silver fox like this? I never noticed.” Angela toyed with a stray strand of her own hair, biting back a laugh as Fareeha glared at her.

“Are you trying to give me a heart attack?” Fareeha sputters. “And actually kill me?”

“On the day of your change-of-command?” Angela tsks. “Of course not. But besides…” Angela threw her hand in the air. “Heroes never die, Strike-Commander.”

“It’s not official until Reyes signs off on it.”

Angela twirled out of their bedroom with a giggle. “As you say, Strike-Commander.”

* * *

 

_57/52_

The restaurant was cozy and empty but for them, a long table full of their teammates all laughing and passing plates of Italian food back and forth.

“What are you thinking about?” Fareeha brushes a stray strand of Angela’s hair back behind her ear, smiling.

Angela bites her lip, eyes flickering between her wife and their friends. “It’s nothing.”

Lena—just as spritely as she was the day Angela first met her, working with Winston to try and hold Lena down in the current timeline, sitting next to her own wife—hastily swallows down half a breadstick and slaps Angela on the back. “Cheer up, love. You and me and big guy over there—” Lena jerks her thumb towards where Gabriel sits in a vague haze of black smoke, trying to terrify one of the newer recruits with some exaggerated battle story from the First Omnic Crisis, no doubt. “We’re in this together, eh? ’Sides, love, it’s Christmas! Can’t be sad on Christmas!”

Angela perks up a little at that, resolutely nodding and gulping down some of her wine. “Of course.”

“Hey,” Fareeha whispers, nuzzling in Angela’s neck. “Cheer up, or I’ll be forced to tell all the newbies about that first test flight with the Valkyrie suit—”

“You would never!” Angela’s eyes brighten, smacking her wife on the shoulder with her napkin.

“Hey, Salim, Warren, Syed,” Fareeha shouts down the table.

The three new recruits turn from Gabriel to Fareeha with big eyes. “Yes, Strike-Commander?” Syed finally squeaks out.

“Wanna hear about the time Mercy here broke her ankle trying to keep up with me in the sky?”

* * *

 

_60/55_

_pt. 1_

“It’s okay, _härzli_ ,” Angela soothes, pushing Fareeha’s hair out of her face. “You will be fine, just stay with me, Fareeha, please.”

Fareeha lolls her head on the concrete, eyes glassy. “Where is the team?”

“The team is fine, but you have to stay here with me, Fareeha. Focus on me. Do you know where you are?” The assistant field medic finally rushes back into the rubble of what was once a nice house, carrying the bone saw. Angela nods for him to start working.

“I know where the hell I am, Mercy, where is the damned team, why are you not with them?” Fareeha snarls, somehow cognizant enough to be angry despite the Raptora suit twisted and crushed around her body.

“Syed is with them, she has the biotic rifle, remember? You said your mother would be proud to see another use it—”

“Goddamn it, Angela!” Fareeha hisses as the medic starts sawing the Raptora off her. “Keep my team alive, don’t worry about me.”

“No.” Angela closes her eyes so she doesn’t have to see the mess the explosion had made of Fareeha’s body right away, so she can brace herself. “You are more important than the mission. The team does not need me—they have Syed—you need me.”

When Angela opens her eyes, there is blood slicking Fareeha’s teeth, and her breathing sounds wet—the Raptora has punctured her trunk, through her back into her sternum, as well as pierced through her legs in several places. Angela inhales sharply, blinking away tears.

“How’s it look, doc?” Fareeha finally murmurs, the fight clearly gone out of her.

“I’ve seen worse.” Angela forces a smile. “I’ve rebuilt people from less workable material.”

* * *

 

_60/55_

_pt. 2_

“Mm, what’s this?” Fareeha asks, picking the white envelope off her desk where it’s been tucked underneath the photo of both her and Angela in their dress uniforms at their wedding.

Angela smirks, pulling knick-knacks off the shelves and packing them into boxes as Fareeha reads the letter.

“You… You’re retiring?” Fareeha says softly, staring at Angela, sliding her reading glasses down her nose. “You’re leaving Overwatch too?”

“There’s another letter behind that one. Might not want to share the next one with the UN council, though.”

Fareeha laughs when she opens the next letter, this one written on the ridiculous cartoon angel stationary Hana had given Angela for her sixtieth.

When Angela glances up from labelling a box, there are tears in Fareeha’s eyes. “Oh, don’t cry, it wasn’t meant to make you sad,” Angela apologizes, rushing to hug her wife. “It was supposed to make you happy.”

“You bought us a house.” Fareeha sets her reading glasses down on her desk, wiping at her tears with the back of her free hand. “And you’re retiring with me?”

“Of course, _schätzeli._ I could never leave you. Why do you think I asked for all those new hires?” Angela laughs, pressing soft kisses up and down Fareeha’s neck, face buried in her soft silver hair. “Besides, I am an old woman, after all.”

“Old?” Fareeha reaches behind Angela’s head and gives a playful tug to her ponytail—as perfectly blonde as ever, skin just as smooth and firm. “And here I was, thinking I was some silver fox attracting all these beautiful girls.” Fareeha clutches at her metal chest dramatically. “Only for my prey to be an old woman after all!”

Angela rolls her eyes. “You wound me.”

* * *

 

_69/64_

_pt. 1_

Angela looks shaken when she hangs up her phone, eyes wide, slumping against the marble kitchen countertop.  

“What’s wrong, _ahubbak_?” Fareeha snaps the book she’d been reading closed.

“Lena’s wife—Emily—died last night. There was an accident.”

“Oh.” It’s all Fareeha can think to say, just as lost in the shock as her wife. “Oh.”

“ _Mein Gott,_ Fareeha, she wasn’t even sixty, she was so young—” Angela stops herself suddenly, and puts on what Fareeha knows is her professional face. “We need to get to London. Poor Lena. Poor Lena.”

* * *

 

_69/64_

_pt. 2_

When they meet at Lena’s apartment before the funeral, Lena looks so much smaller than Fareeha remembers her being, especially with her hair brushed flat against her head. The black dress she’s wearing is intentionally two sizes too large, so it can cover the chronal accelerator, and Lena looks like she’s drowning in it. For the first time, it occurs to Fareeha just how much older she is physically than either Lena or Angela, both stuck forever in time.

“I’m so sorry, Lena,” Angela says immediately, wrapping the small woman up in a hug. “I’m so sorry.”

Lena breaks down, entire body shaking. Angela just strokes her hair and hums, holding her close.

Fareeha quietly shuts the door to the apartment and does what her mother would have told her to do—make tea, and wait for the tears to stop. The electric kettle simmers as she pulls a box of PG Tips from the cabinet, along with three cups.

“I tried to save her,” Lena keeps repeating. “I kept rewinding, I kept blinking back, but I couldn’t—I tried to save her.”

“And anybody would do the same.” Angela leads Lena to the old corduroy sofa in the living room.

“I tried to save her and I couldn’t—I went back a dozen times, until the accelerator wouldn’t let me—I just tried to save her. And I couldn’t.”

The kettle clicks when it’s ready. Fareeha pours the boiling water over the tea bags with a quiet sigh. Lena is all up curled up on Angela’s lap, grabbing at the lapels of her jacket, body still shaking with the force of her sobbing.

“You did well, Lena. But there are some miracles that are not meant to be.” Angela presses her cheek to the top of Lena’s head, tucking her in close.

“Do y’think… You’ll ever find a cure for immortality?” Lena asks hoarsely.

Fareeha sees how Angela goes stiff at that, something dark and unknowable in her eyes.

“Well,” Angela says shakily. “It wouldn’t be immortality if I found a way to end it, now would it?”

* * *

_77/72_

“Now, come on, _schäri_ , you are fine,” Angela soothes, wiping down the mechanical innards that had replaced most of Fareeha’s organs since her last ill-fated flight in the Raptora suit. Angela gently slides the metal cover-plate back over Fareeha’s torso with a smile. “There. Nothing to complain about, was it?”

“Nothing like your wife scrubbing out your organs to build the relationship, is there?” Fareeha sighs.

“I don’t mind taking care of you, you know.” Angela ties Fareeha’s robe back in place with a smile. “If you would ever let me.”

Fareeha snorts. “I’m not letting you feed me my protein shakes. A woman has to have her dignity, you know.”

Angela twines their hands together with a sigh. “It is not undignified to ask for help.” She presses a soft kiss to the back of Fareeha’s hand, and—as happens so often now—Fareeha is struck with just how different they have become, as the years passed for her and not for her wife. While her own hands have been worn down by age and arthritis and too many years in a battlefield, Angela’s are as smooth and unblemished as ever, nails neatly trimmed.

“ _Elbi_ , we need to talk,” Fareeha says softly.

Angela pulls her hands away abruptly, frown creasing her face. “Not now.”

“I’m not getting any younger, Angela. We can’t keep putting it off forever.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Angela, please.” Fareeha collapses back against the pillows of the bed Angela’d ordered special from a hospital supplier for her. “I’m tired. I’m old.”

Angela bites her lip hard enough to draw a pinprick of blood, blinking away tears. “Please don’t ask me to do this, Fareeha. Please don’t.”

“I just want to rest, love. Promise me you’ll let me rest, when it happens, okay?”

Angela nods. “Y-your mother said the same thing.” She laughs unsteadily.

“But promise me you won’t wallow here forever, alright?” Fareeha holds her hand out for Angela to take it again, and she does, curling up on the bed right alongside her wife, head pillowed on Fareeha’s chest. “Go back to Overwatch. Go back to medicine, or being a combat medic, or become a poet or a movie star or whatever you want, but promise me, Angela—promise me you won’t sit here and miss me until the end of time. Don’t sit at my funeral and wallow in the grief.”  

“I promise,” Angela whispers. “I love you, Fareeha.”

“I love you too.”

* * *

 

_78_

The Valkyrie suit still fits, after all these years out of service. With the staff in her hand, pistol holstered at her thigh—it feels like Angela has finally come home.

Lena sets a hand on Angela’s shoulder. “You sure ‘bout this, love? Still time to make it to the funeral if you want, no shame in changing your mind.”

“No. This is… This is what she would have wanted.” Angela closes her eyes, inhaling sharply. “It’s what I want.”

“Well, so long as you’re sure, love.” Lena shoots her a comically exaggerated salute with a grin. “C’mon then, Mercy, transport’s waiting!”

Angela takes one last look at the little country house that she’d called home for so many years with Fareeha. Good memories, bittersweet memories—wasted time that she’d spent imagining a what-if where she’d age right alongside Fareeha, instead of appreciating what she’d had in her hands.

Lena must catch the sadness on Angela’s face, because she tugs at Angela’s hand again. “Look, I know it’s hard. But it gets easier. And besides—you’re not alone, love! Got me and Gabriel right alongside ya ‘til the end of time!”

She straightens up and nods, stepping towards the unmarked black car that Gabriel sits in, ready to drive to the pick-up point. “I suppose I do.” Angela smiles, straightens up. “Let’s go.”

**Author's Note:**

> About the character death warning (spoilers): Ana and Fareeha both die, as does Emily. It's implied, just due to the amount of time that passes in this fic, that large portions of the original team have died as well (i.e., 76, Rein, etc) but that's incidental and honestly could be ignored. Maybe they all moved to a nice vacation clubhouse somewhere. 
> 
> Also, I am a US Army brat so a lot of the military stuff in here is ripped from my time there, so there’s likely to be inconsistencies re: what other countries call dress blues and things, sorry! 
> 
> find me on [tumblr](http://officialclaricestarling.tumblr.com) | play overwatch with me @ clstarling#1290 | talk to me on discord @ claricestarling#4370 (just say you're from ao3 if you wanna talk) | [deleted]


End file.
